Romney unveils plan to end housing crisis

Governor Mitt Romney yesterday outlined his plan to end the housing crisis. The Republican presidential nominee, on a new page of his campaign website, called for a four-step approach: selling government-owned foreclosed vacant homes, introducing foreclosure alternatives for distressed borrowers, reforming Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and doing away with complex rules in order to hold banks more accountable and stimulate lending to credit-worthy borrowers.

The plan, in the form of a bullet-pointed list, was short on specifics about how a Romney administration would go about putting these proposed policies in place. It does not, for example, detail what foreclosure alternatives Romney proposes or how he plans to hold banks more accountable.

Romney did say that the housing plan was among his wider economic policies that would create 12 million jobs and increase wages by the end of his first term. He also called President Barack Obama’s approach to the housing crisis too “government-centric” and too dependent on taxpayer dollars.

The new campaign literature is the first time Romney has spoken specifically of a strategy to improve the nation’s housing market, even though experts say that housing policy could have a huge impact on swing state voters. — Adam Fusfeld